Walt Disney Company’s ABC television network is being sued by three former French employees who claim they were illegally fired and deprived of royalties when their work was syndicated.

Journalists Fabrice Moussus, Robert Peyrano, and Patrick Etcheverry claim ABC fired them in October 2004 after they asked to work 35 hours a week, as French law allows. The company also failed to obtain legal ownership of their footage, they say. The men are due to ask a Paris labor tribunal on June 7 for a total of 2.1 million in compensation and damages.

“They owe us a dividend,” Mr. Moussus, who had worked for ABC 27 years, said in an interview in Paris. He claims neither he nor his colleagues, who had been with the network 23 and 36 years respectively, had ever signed a work contract with the company.

ABC didn’t return a total of five phone messages seeking comment at its New York press office on June 2 and yesterday.

Under French law, authors are entitled to compensation for their work unless they clearly waive their rights in writing. Employers can use the output from their staff, but must pay royalties to the authors if they syndicate it.

“French law protects authors more than the companies they work for,” an intellectual property lawyer in Nice, Benjamin Fievre, said. “There is no fixed measure to establish how much they may be entitled to: that’s up for the judge to decide.”

ABC claimed that their termination was necessary because of “economic difficulties that the Walt Disney Group, to which it belongs, is facing, “Mr.Moussus cited his letter of dismissal as saying.French law requires that companies must demonstrate financial difficulties before they can reduce their workforce.

The next month, Disney’s chief executive officer, Michael Eisner, told global employees that the company had a “terrific 2004.” “Our performance was outstanding by any measure,” Mr. Eisner said in the November 18, 2004, email, according to Mr. Moussus.

“They were telling us: we have no money to pay your salaries, and then they were going on saying how well the company was doing,” Mr. Peyrano said.

ABC sells archived documentaries over the Internet, in DVD format for consumers. Professional filmmakers and television networks can pay several thousands dollars per minute of footage, Mr. Moussus said. In 2003, Mr. Moussus shot the footage and Mr. Peyrano recorded the sound of an ABC documentary on “The Da Vinci Code,” which was co- produced by National Geographic. Both Messrs. Moussus and Peyrano’s names were in the documentary’s credits.

“National Geographic has been broadcasting it over and over again,” Mr. Moussus said. National Geographic in France broadcast the documentary twice on May 18, according to a television schedule. For this documentary, the men are asking for 50,000 euros each, Mr. Moussus said.